"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."-- Douglas Adams

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Sphere (1998)

Note: This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

WARNING: I’m going to give away major plot points including the
ending. If you don’t like spoilers, you might want to watch the movie
before reading this review.

Let’s say that you cleared
away 300 years of coral growth and found a spaceship. What would you
do? Well, you’d probably send down a team of experts to investigate.
Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Sharon Stone play Doctors Norman
Johnson, Harry Adams and Elizabeth Halperin, respectively. They, along
with a few other scientists, go down to said ship. It’s so far beneath
the water that it takes special equipment to get there. Since it’s so
deep, a quick rescue won’t be that easy.

What they find is a big,
golden, metallic sphere. (It’s said to be a perfect sphere despite
having obvious ripples on the surface.) Dr. Adams is the first to go in
to the sphere and come back out. Unfortunately, he doesn’t recall
anything about it. Also quite unfortunate is that strange things start
happening and those strange things put the people at risk.

What’s
even stranger is that the ship has signs in both English and Spanish.
Also, there are several log entries with dates like 06/21/43. The team
realizes that they’re on an American ship from the future. Because the
date is so vague, there’s no way to know if it’s from 2043 or 9943.
However, from what they can tell, someone in the future launches a ship
from Earth to collect strange and unusual objects from across the
galaxy.

On or around 6/21/43, it comes across a black hole and is
sent back in time, where it crash lands on Earth around the year 1698,
give or take a few decades. The logs refer to it an unknown event,
which leads Dr. Adams to conclude that no one makes it off the ship
alive. He reasons that if they did make it off the ship alive, they’d
report it to someone. That someone would then record that they found
the ship and those in the future would know what happened to their ship.

When
a storm hits the surface, the team has to spend a week on the ship or
an adjacent habitat. This gives the team a week to worry about
something going drastically wrong. Someone has to put a special code
into their vehicle so that it knows someone is still down there. If
not, it goes back up to the surface with whatever data they’ve
collected, presumably leaving them stranded. At the very least, this
means that someone has to leave the safety and comfort of the ship and
expose themselves to whatever dangers lurk several thousand feet below.

There
are also those strange things I mentioned, like a giant octopus
attacking the habitat. One of the scientists is also attacked by
jellyfish. Then there’s the alien consciousness that’s communicating
through the habitat’s computers. This whole death and destruction thing
is starting to look more and more likely. It’s definitely not a good
day for any of them to be claustrophobic.

Now, you’re probably
wondering if the team makes it back out alive. Some of the people do
die, leaving Adams, Halperin and Johnson to figure out what’s going on.
The thing I don’t like about Adams’s prediction is that it will likely
go one of two ways. Either he’s right or he’s wrong. There’s no
definitive proof what happens to them, which is ironically his only
proof that they don’t make it out alive. Even if they do make it out
alive, there’s no reason to think that the reports won’t get buried
under tons of paperwork or be forgotten about. (The ship could have
been launched 500 years from now. How accurate are our records from 500
years ago?)

Here’s where I spoil the ending. They do make it
out alive. They have to be put in a decompression chamber, leaving them
plenty of time to ponder how lucky they were to make it out alive,
which leads Adams to wonder how that happened. He figures that they
must have forgotten all about it. Since this must have happened, they
realize that they must have the powers to make themselves forget, so
they make themselves forget before they can be debriefed.

I have
several problems with this. First, I can’t accept that they would be
the only team to go down there. No one in the movie explicitly states
that it’s too dangerous to go back down. Even still, you have a strange
ship sitting at the bottom of the ocean with at least 40 years until
the unknown event. You can’t tell me that in all those years, not even
an unmanned probe was sent down to investigate.

You’d think that
they’d make up some story about how no one should go back down. Maybe
the writers figured that this was to cliché and wanted something
different. When they realized how much work this was, they went with
the first thing that came to mind.

At the end of the movie, the
golden sphere is seen leaving the ship and eventually the planet. Yes,
it’s possible that the sphere deleted the records, but this is something
else that’s not explicitly stated. I’d imagine that this is something
that’s dealt with in Michael Crichton’s book, which served as the source
material. I would have liked some closure in that respect. Either
have someone say that no one else will be sent down or the ship was
mysteriously destroyed or something.

The big oddity was that the
golden sphere was the only odd thing down there. Yes, it’s a big
universe and most of it is a big void. The future ship was a manned
mission, meaning that there were people onboard. This wasn’t some drone
collecting rock samples. We had people that could say, “Hey! That
looks interesting. Let’s take that back with us.”

The movie was
ultimately disappointing. Yes, there was a lot of tension and
suspense. The ending was a big disappointment. It seemed like an easy
out, like they couldn’t figure out a better way to end it. I don’t know
how the movie differs from the book. I’d imagine that there is a
different ending or at least more explanation. At least I got a review
out of it.